Discussion for a next-generation wireless local area network (WLAN) is in progress. In the next-generation WLAN, an object is to 1) improve an institute of electronic and electronics engineers (IEEE) 802.11 physical (PHY) layer and a medium access control (MAC) layer in bands of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, 2) increase spectrum efficiency and area throughput, 3) improve performance in actual indoor and outdoor environments such as an environment in which an interference source exists, a dense heterogeneous network environment, and an environment in which a high user load exists, and the like.
An environment which is primarily considered in the next-generation WLAN is a dense environment in which access points (APs) and stations (STAs) are a lot and under the dense environment, improvement of the spectrum efficiency and the area throughput is discussed. Further, in the next-generation WLAN, in addition to the indoor environment, in the outdoor environment which is not considerably considered in the existing WLAN, substantial performance improvement is concerned.
Specifically, scenarios such as wireless office, smart home, stadium, Hotspot, and building/apartment are largely concerned in the next-generation WLAN and discussion about improvement of system performance in a dense environment in which the APs and the STAs are a lot is performed based on the corresponding scenarios.
In the next-generation WLAN, improvement of system performance in an overlapping basic service set (OBSS) environment and improvement of outdoor environment performance, and cellular offloading are anticipated to be actively discussed rather than improvement of single link performance in one basic service set (BSS). Directionality of the next-generation means that the next-generation WLAN gradually has a technical scope similar to mobile communication. When a situation is considered, in which the mobile communication and the WLAN technology have been discussed in a small cell and a direct-to-direct (D2D) communication area in recent years, technical and business convergence of the next-generation WLAN and the mobile communication is predicted to be further active.